The Duty and Difficulty of Protecting Children from Sexual Abuse

Let's talk about why it's important for believing members to be okay with  condemning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its failures to adequately protect children from sexual abuse.

 

The Church is not just an institution made of policies and procedures like some sort of abstract machine. First and foremost, it is an assemblage of people. It's going to have all the same problems people have. And there is a problem with childhood sexual abuse in our society. The Church has a childhood sexual abuse problem because our society has a sexual abuse problem. And I say that as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. 

This is something every person needs to be acquainted with how to address. Not just at Church. In their jobs. In their families. In their schools. In the friend groups of their children. For a child to be abused secretly, more than just a church needs to fail.  

Teachers. Coaches. Youth group leaders, secular and religious. Parents. Friends of parents. Other relatives. 

Think of all the adults in a child's life that have to fail them for a secret like this to go on being kept. How many adults have to be unsafe for a child to say nothing?

This is a failure in the Church to take this seriously. But I'm afraid too many people are so eager to dunk on church leadership, they're not internalizing the important lesson here. It's not just the church leaders who failed. 

Every adult in that family's lives failed. 

An estimated 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of childhood sexual abuse, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Think about what that means in your life. Your family members. Your children's friends. Your students. Your friend's children. 

Maybe you've managed to be surrounded by the 4 out of 5 girls and 19 out of 20 boys every day of your life who has never experienced sexual abuse, that you've never missed the opportunity to help. 

Or maybe you're not as safe of an adult as you think you are.

The entire reason I refused to ever report the sexual abuse that happened to me was because I never wanted to be forcibly separated from my younger sister. If I didn't know where she was, I couldn't protect her. Any adult who would've come into my life, guns blazing, trying to upturn my situation with no thought as to how the dust was going to settle once law enforcement came into my life was not trustworthy to me. Especially when sexual abuse is rampant in the foster care system.

Helping childhood sexual assault victims is many things. Heartbreaking. Tragic. Delicate. Morally fraught, especially for all the ways a child's wishes have no weight on the situation.

 

The one thing it's not is simple, which is why we all are so abysmally bad at addressing it in our society.

 

So why am I in a place where I criticize the Church for these failures, especially from a place where my association with the institution isn't changed by stories like this? Several reasons.

• The Church won't change what it doesn't have to acknowledge from the inside.
• These types of failures exist everywhere in our society, not just in the Church. It's not like I have anywhere I can go to escape it. It's literally everywhere. 
• I can, and have, done work to heal survivors on the ground in my local congregations.
• My experience as a survivor in the Church, because the Church was not connected to my abuse, has been overwhelmingly positive. I have seen how well the Church can do the work of healing survivors, when they do it right. To me, that is a goal worth working towards.

So if it makes you uncomfortable to see a faithful church member condemning the Church for how it's currently handling its failures to protect children from being abused, maybe you should sit down and ask yourself: 

 

What do I think the Atonement is for if not for this?

You might think I can't be a good Christian if I'm willing to condemn the prophets and apostles over this. I don't think you can be a good Christian without it.